O Clube Marítimo Africano: Maritime Networks and Black Internationalism in Lisbon

• In Event: Mid-20th Century Black Resistance Struggles - Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, pt. 1

Description for Program

In 1954, the Clube Marítimo Africano (CMA) was founded in Lisbon by a group of merchant ship and dock workers alongside African university students studying in the metropole. While the CMA began as a sports club, it wasn’t long before this organization developed into a key site of radicalization and political education against racialized, settler-colonial exploitation. A key aspect of this partnership derived from the fact that the ships’ workers could traffic subversive literature through the docks. These texts, written by intellectuals across the Black diaspora to produce Black and Marxist consciousness, were inaccessible under the Portuguese dictatorial regime. Thus, as these ships traveled between Portugal, Brazil, and the African colonies they carried more than just cargo across the Atlantic, they carried the radical ideas that would birth a revolution. This talk analyzes this curious formation of workers and students in the Portuguese metropole and their use of colonial trade routes toward anticolonial visions. I analyze organizational documents of the CMA and previously collected oral history interviews that not only highlight the cultural and political activities of the CMA, but also demonstrate how those activities were embedded within a network of Black internationalism that was connected by a network of maritime trade.

Author

• C. Darius Gordon, Johns Hopkins University